Skip to main content

Beloved in the West, scorned by Japanese literati.

Not Murakami again! I hear you say, but I like Murakami so whatcha gonna do?

The Age has an interesting article on the author, and it includes some titbits that I was previously unaware of:
Despite what Japan's most hidebound pundits argue, Murakami's writing has always been closer to his homeland than the fictional universes of Fitzgerald, Carver and Chandler. Occidental critics ritually compare Murakami with postmodernists such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. But in Japan, as Murakami tells it, "people do not think my stories are postmodern". In Japanese spirituality, the divide between the real and the fantastic is permeable, so his tales of unicorn skulls, six-foot frogs, star-patterned sheep and Colonel Sanders are "very natural".
Ah, gotta love Japanese surrealism.
Labels:

Comments

  1. bibliobibuli28/6/06 8:57 pm

    that's fascinating!

    when i talked to a famous japanese poet and academic i was also amazed to find that maurukami is not really considered respectable by the literary establishment who regards what he writes as pop fiction ...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ted Mahsun29/6/06 10:43 am

    That's probably because he avoids the local literary groups and refuses interviews from the local press. They probably think he's thumbing his nose at them!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ted Mahsun29/6/06 11:09 am

    I'd love to meet your husband. However, I'm no longer the anime/manga geek (or otaku, whatever) I think you imagine me to be.

    Besides, the only anime/manga I go for are down-to-earth romance for teen girls...

    Er... did I just let a skeleton out of my closet...?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm going to Clarion West!

So yeah! I'm going to Clarion West this year! If you didn't know, Clarion West is a really awesome science fiction and fantasy writing workshop that runs for six weeks in summer every year at Seattle and is usually taught by a faculty of award-winning authors and editors. Many students who attend this workshop also go on to have illustrious writing careers of their own too. I've been meaning to attend this workshop (or its sister workshop, Clarion UCSD, which is the original Clarion workshop but runs in San Diego around the same time) for years now but never had the courage to apply. Many reasons as to why: didn't think I'd have money for the most part, didn't think I was good enough, didn't think I could leave work long enough, didn't think I could leave family behind, etc. But something sparked inside of me late last year. I felt I should at least give it a go this time round. So I did. They requested a sample of my best work and an applicatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dedicated by Burgess.

I've been wanting to blog this for ages, but I've never managed to make the scanner work properly... that is till now. Some years back, my dad was browsing the shelves of NovelHut, Ipoh's best second-hand bookstore, and found a copy of Anthony Burgess's Time for a Tiger . Price? RM2. (That would be approximately USD$0.60 or GBP£0.30). Did I mention it was a hardcover first edition? Here's the dedication page, with the famous dedication written in Jawi. Jawi is the Malay language written in Arab script, a norm early last century. Nowadays, Malay is written in Romanised form. The dedication says: " Kepada sahabat-sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu " which translates into "To my friends in Malaya." On the opposite page, proof this is the first edition. A first edition is probably valuable by itself. But this copy has something extra that makes it even more special--a personal dedication by Burgess himself to a friend: If you can't make the writing out...
15 comments
Read more

REVIEW: Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami.

UPDATE: My Wind/Pinball review can be found here . ISBN: n/a Publisher: n/a Paperback: 160 pages In Murakami fan circles, simply owning a copy of Pinball, 1973 is a mark of hardcore-ness. Like Hear the Wind Sing before it, Haruki Murakami does not allow English translations of Pinball, 1973 to be published outside of Japan. Back in the 80s, Alfred Birnbaum translated it into English and Kodansha published it as a novel for Japanese students who wanted to improve their English. While the English edition of Hear the Wind Sing continues to be reprinted and sold in Japan (and available for a moderate sum via eBay, see my review ), Kodansha stopped its reprint runs of the English edition of Pinball, 1973 and has now become a collector's item, fetching vast amounts of money on auction sites and reseller stores. Last time I checked, the cheapest copy went for USD$2500. Of course, Murakami addicts or the curious can always download a less than legal PDF of the book, painst...
18 comments
Read more